There is much to be learned from people who occupied positions in the intelligence structures of communist countries, and chose to defect to the West. Unlike any other personal profile, these people combine (1) access to extremely privileged information - about facts, tactics, and strategies; and (2) a moral spine which eventually drove them to defect, as well as to speak publically and honestly about their experiences.

One of these people is Ion Mihai Pacepa, who since his defection in 1978 has published several books and in recent years written several fascinating articles, e.g. in 2006 The Kremlin's Killing Ways.

Another of these people is Yuri Bezmenov, apparently a Soviet intelligence agent who worked in India before defecting to the West in the late 1960s. An interview with him was released in 1984 by G. Edward Griffin, and Google Video features some very tasty bits of this interview. Another, shorter video on YouTube contains more background information but the editing is more patronizing and includes less of the tasty bits, too.

Here are some quotations from the interview:
It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization; it takes 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why this many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of your enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students. [...] The next stage is destabilization. [...] This time - and it takes only from 2-5 years to destabilize a nation - what matters is essentials: economy; foreign relations; defense systems. And you can see quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it 14 years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process will go that fast. The next stage of course is crisis - it may take only up to 6 weeks to bring country to the verge of crisis, you can see it in Central America now - and after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure and economy, you have, so called, the period of "normalization"; it may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression, borrowed from Soviet propaganda - when the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Comrad Brezhnyev said: "Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized." [...] Your leftists in the United States, all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders - they are instrumental in the process of subversion, only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they're not needed any more. They know too much; some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see the Marxist-Leninists come to power, obviously they get offended. They think that they will come to power - that will never happen of course, they will be lined up against the wall and shot. But they may turn into the most bitter enemies of Marxist-Leninists when they come to power. And that's what happened in Nicaragua - you remember most of these former Marxist-Leninists were either put to prison, or one of them split and now he's working against Sandinistas. [... Recounts more examples in Grenada, Afghanistan and Bangladesh ...] It's the same pattern everywhere.
Highly recommended. There's lots more.

Incidentally, it appears that Pacepa thinks it 'perfectly obvious' that WMD existed in Iraq, but were hidden with Russian help. He notes that a similar plan was prepared by the Soviet Union for Libya, and that such a plan existed and was implemented in Iraq.

If this is true, it actually helps my perception of the world make more sense, and it also changes the way I view George W. Bush dramatically. I always wondered why Tony Blair, seemingly an intelligent and clear-minded individual, one not as obviously prone to manipulation as American media led us to believe about Bush - why would he follow Bush into this bad idea of the Iraq war if the weapons of mass destruction did not actually exist? But if the Russians hid those WMD, of which they are obviously entirely capable, then it makes perfect sense; the WMD existed, Bush and Blair invaded, but in the mean time the WMD disappeared and they were made to look like fools.

Given what Pacepa and Bezmenov tell us about Soviet strategy - and given that KGB is now obviously in charge in Moscow - disinformation lives. Perhaps it's as alive as ever.